This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations.
The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.
I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
I also think that a lot of the problems with yaml specifically are overblown, but this post is actually not about that!
It is specifically saying the same problem exists in JSON/YAML/TOML, etc, which is that all these configuration languages don't have any real means of abstraction, and ultimately aren't expressive enough do to the job we require of them.
as soon as you are templating config files with other configs, I agree, I have sorely felt this limitation with helm charts
Serious question: do people who work with these config files frequently, or on large such files, use simple text editors, or are there "smart" editors that do things like prevent you from making typos or inserting the wrong data type, similar to an HTML form that does basic validation or a DB schema that rejects bad data?
There is no single cure-all, of course, but surely we should be relying on computers to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to validation and verification of these files, not just as linters after the fact but in realtime while we're editing, and with some sort of knowledge (even if derived programmatically) of what is right and what is wrong so we no longer have to worry about simple footguns.
I think one of the problems of those "configuration languages" is that you can extract semantic information without knowing the target, e.g., with has a specific meaning in GitHub Actions but it is otherwise an unremarkable word in the YAML specification.
But when working with real programming languages it is completely different, you can take semantic information from the current code, and you can have things like types to give you safety.
The problem is most configuration languages are declarative vs imperative like most “real” languages are. You could probably levy the same complaint against declarative languages in general - it’s just a different way of thinking
Nix as used in NixOS is a declarative language and there is none of the issues I cited by being a "real" programming language (or as the article talks about, having "abstractions" like builtin.map). You can pretty easily setup a LSP to get code-completion (even between different projects, like NixOS vs Home-Manager). There is no proper type system in Nix but the module system does supplement it well.
I think this might underestimate how gambling + kids games can reinforce destructive behavior.
There are lots of similar tools that casino owners/game designers/sports betting apps/social media/&c use to build addiction into their products, all while offloading responsibility onto individual consumers.
A really interesting study of this is the book 'Addiction by Design' by Natasha Dow Schüll examines this in the context of slot machines/video poker/casino games, but you can see the same process at work basically wherever you look.
I think the meaning is that the idea that compilers can only compile for their host machine is an ananchronism, since that was historically the case but is no longer true.
Heck, it hasn't been true since the 1950s. Consider it as "has never been true".
Oh, sure, there have been plenty of native-host-only compilers. It was never a property of all compilers, though. Most system brings-ups, from the mainframes of the 1960s through the minis of the 1970s to the micros and embeddeds of the 1980s and onwards have required cross compilers.
I think what he means is that a single-target toolchain is an anachronism. That's also not true, since even clang doesn't target everything under the sun in one binary. A toolchain needs far more than a compiler, for a start; it needs the headers and libraries and it needs a linker. To go from source to executable (or herd of dynamic shared objects) requires a whole lot more than installing the clang (or whatever front-end) binary and choosing a nifty target triple. Most builds of clang don't even support all the interesting target triples and you need to build it yourself, which require a lot more computer than I can afford.
Target triples are not even something limited to toolchains. I maintain software that gets cross-built to all kinds of targets all the time and that requires target triples for the same reasons compilers do. Target triples are just a basic tool of the trade if you deal with anything other than scripting the browser and they're a solved problem rediscovered every now and then by people who haven;t studied their history.
Telling people that "Clang can compile for any architecture you like!" tends to confuse them more than it helps. I suppose it sets up unrealistic assumptions because of course outputting assembly for some architecture is a very long way from making working userland binaries for a system based on that architecture, which is what people actually want.
And ironically in all of this, building a full toolchain based on GCC is still easier than with LLVM.
I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store.
But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience
I think this really underrates the 15 years of work that has gone into creating interlocking systems to generate geography, civilizations, people, artifacts, emotions, poetry, &c, &c. Especially because you can see, often, what specific historical events or personal events are impacting your dwarfs frame by frame.
So on the contrary I DF is an example of how creative & human generative algorithms can be, you can't get anything as rich as DF with LLMs (currently at least, I guess)
This really misstates an important point - the Unification Church is not "believed to be behind" the assassination, it was a man holding a grudge against the Church. Pretty much the opposite meaning. I don't think this comment is useful for discussion.
I think it's interesting that Lamport chose this style for Paxos Made Simple[0]
Which iteratively goes through a process of proposing a solution for a problem (proposal 0: accept the first value the acceptor comes across) and then reveals the problem with it, and amends the proposal to fix the problem
according to the archivists i know, they are cowboys who don't listen to the advice or follow the historic practices of archivists. For example, you should ask permission before you archive something. You have the right to be forgotten, and archive.org scoffs at that premise by ingesting and serving the whole historic web without permission from the owners.
The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.
I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.